


What Is and What Must Be

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1x12 AU. In fairytale land, women must be strong in their own ways. Belle-centric, potential TW for a mention of suicide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Is and What Must Be

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for exopotamie, who held my hand while I ranted and raved and used dirty words throughout the writing of this story.

I.

Summer. She is small and the world is infinite and beautiful and bright. She wants to hold onto it forever, the breeze and the sunshine and the warm softness of the grass, in her selfish childish way. She can no more explain this to Nan Marie than she can explain it to herself.

‘When the sun went behind a cloud, I cried,’ she confesses to Gaston years later, when she is old enough to explain that sad, aching want that sat inside for so long. ‘Nan Marie shouted at me for crying, but I couldn’t stop.’

‘But the sun came back out, didn’t it?’ Gaston says, ever pragmatic. ‘It wasn’t gone forever.’

Belle shakes her head. ‘It was different, though. It’s always been strange since then. Something was gone.’ She understands it as easy as breathing. Once lost, it is never recovered.  
She looks up at his open, honest face. He is a good man, she thinks to herself. He will never understand, but he loves her as well as he can.

‘We should talk of something else,’ she says to him, and that is her forgiveness.

 

II.  
Nan Marie cups Belle’s face in her hands. ‘You are a lord’s daughter, and so you must remember the rules of being a lord’s daughter,’ she says. She is neither old nor young, Nan Marie, neither pretty nor ugly. Her gaze is very direct, eyes wide and grey and boring deep. Belle thinks of her in the same way she thinks of the old gods, as something immense and timeless and unchanging, a constant presence. The world will end and Nan Marie will emerge from the flames, her vivid grey eyes still searching.

‘You must never be selfish,’ says Nan Marie. ‘A lord’s daughter never lives only for herself, but for the people around her. The villagers on your father’s land will be the villagers on your land, and you must watch over them with kindness and strength and fairness. You are two halves and you must never let one destroy the other.’

‘I won’t,’ promises Belle. She can say nothing else, with those grey eyes studying her.

‘And you must never cry,’ Nan Marie says.

She never does. She stands rigid and tall and proud, and the mask she wears does not slip.

 

III.

No one asks her if she loves Gaston, any more than one asks the sun if it prefers to come up in the mornings and set in the evenings. And what would it matter if she does not? That is the function of a lover, to reach out and discover what is missing and to offer body and soul as penance for another’s suffering.

She does love him, perhaps out of comfort and familiarity. He is no passionate, adventurous soul, Gaston, not like the heroes in novels. He will grow old and dandle babies on his knee and pass judgments on villagers’ disputes over crops and goats and never dream of anything more. But she reaches for him in the night and presses his hands to her breasts. In sleep, she is adrift, and he brings her to shore.

 

IV.

Her mother had lived long enough to see Belle’s fourth sunrise, in the tradition of all tragic heroines, dying quietly in the night as her husband mourned at her bedside. Her beauty had fled and gone to grey paper and sharp angles. They burned her blood-stained sheets and prayed for her soul’s quick ascension.

Maurice never speaks to his daughter of it: his grief he shuts away, as she learns to do, for some vulnerabilities are too deep to ever share.

She wonders if he has ever been frightened that she will attempt to peel back the layers of armor and discover his secret hurts. The idea is strange — Belle has never missed her mother, unable to understand missing something she was never conscious of having in the first place — but there is still a silent, invisible barrier that prevents them from getting too close to one another. He cares, she knows, but it pains him to.

 

V.

In the tradition of all lords’ daughters, she is bought and sold in the womb, promised to Gaston when she is little more than the gentle curve of her mother’s stomach.  
She asks him what he thought of her at first.

‘You were very small and very pink,’ he says. ‘That’s all I remember.’ He is not so much older than her, only a sliver of years separating her birth from his.

‘And you loved me at first sight?’ she teases.

His cheeks redden and he stutters, ‘N-not then — ’

Belle laughs and kisses him. All at once, she is overcome with pure and uncomplicated love for this simple boy and his simple views, and she grasps at the moment with both hands, unsure of how long it will last.

 

VI.

She cannot remember a time without the Ogre Wars. Life has coiled around them, shaped itself around them, borne its blows and gone forward. Battles rage and subside, sides claiming victory and conceding defeat over bits of land like two dogs snarling for the same mauled bone. The land means nothing any longer; they fight for the sake of their pride and the scraps of their egos and for tradition, for their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, who had all held onto the dreamy nature of some unnamed grudge lost in the blood and dirt of centuries prior. You can look any man in the eye and ask him why he fights and he will tell you the same answer, because I must, with the dead-eyed commitment his family has passed from generation to generation, this incomprehensible, beloved ideal.

But she has always known it to be a battle for someone else’s land, someone else’s kingdom, a war existing on the fringes of her consciousness. Someone else’s red-eyed, agonized serving maids, averting their eyes to avoid a mistress’ questions, someone else’s sons lying in fields clutching spastically at their spilled guts as they beg to die quickly.  
Not hers. Oh no, it has never been hers.

 

VII.

She says to Nan Marie, ‘What if I hadn’t been born a lord’s daughter?’

Nan Marie slaps her.

‘Your fate is your fate. Don’t question what can’t be changed.’

 

VIII.

My father was a young man, once. Belle says it aloud to the mirror and flushes with something like guilt, as though conscious of telling a lie. There are truths she cannot comprehend, enormities so vast that when she closes her eyes she thinks they could swallow the world. It is not so unbelievable, she tells herself, that he was once young and strong and unbent, and she finds it easier to tell herself that she will sprout the wings of an angel and fly away from these wars and these haunted, ugly times.

No, his mother had birthed him old and weary and shouldering great burdens. The agony is etched deep. Belle goes to lift the weight from his back, but it is not hers to carry.

 

IX.

‘But we have no other choice,’ says her father.

It will break him.

‘We must,’ says her father.

They wait in a line, silent statues. Their faces are blank. They are watching a man sign his own death warrant. It is only the manner of execution that will differ.

‘You understand, don’t you?’ says her father.

The advisors say nothing. They look away from him. In his eyes is a desperate, naked agony. It is not their place to witness him in this moment.

 

X.

The little man repulses her. He does not frighten her. Belle stands straightii, holds her father’s strings taut. If I die here, she says to herself, let the stories be told that I went with my jaw set and my head held high. My fate is to be a lord’s daughter and I will live as a lord’s daughter and I will die as a lord’s daughter. My shame will not break me.

‘But you must give me something in return,’ says the little man, insolently. He lounges in her father’s chair without concern, rubbing his fingers over the smooth wood as though caressing a lover. His eyes are fox-bright. His coiled energy is putrid and suffocating. She hates him with a viciousness that could consume her.

Her father says, ‘We have nothing to give. We are a poor village, and these wars — ‘

The little man quiets him with a wave. ‘Then there is no deal. Simple as that.’

In her dreams, the wolves wait for her. The horizon is long and flat and still. She searches for the edge of the world, but she cannot see past them. They watch her with yellow eyes of warning. If she moves, they will tear her to pieces.

If I am doomed either way, I will go towards the sun.

‘Will you have me?’ she says.

The little man shows his teeth. ‘Your offer is bold.’

Gaston’s fingers close on her arm, tugging her back from the precipice. She does not look at him. You are holding onto a memory of me, she says to herself. I am already falling, already gone, already lost.

 

XI.

He permits her no farewells. She is grateful. Uncertainty is the kindness that keeps her upright, the box that holds the truths she cannot bear to face. And why should she? Honesty wins no wars.

 

XII.

The estate is wrapped like an old woman in winter, suffocating under the weight of itself. Briefly, she feels sorry for him and for the lie he lives. He lives as he imagines a gentleman must, with no understanding of what a gentleman is. A child lives much the same way, imagination unfettered by knowledge. In his mind, he takes flight. Standing on the ground, she watches a man flap paper wings and strain towards something he can never reach. His aspirations are no necessity, only a show of greed. A man who commands fear does not need to command respect. One is implicit in the other. In his hunger, he commands neither.

 

XIII.

He gives her simple clothing. She ties her hair back with a piece of twine, tucks it under a dirty rag. Several times she thinks of taking a kitchen knife to it and hacking it close, like a boy’s; when one’s life has been set on a strict course from which no deviations can be taken, the safe, tiny risks seem like scaling mountains. 

 

XIV.

‘…and when the Devil heard about the king who would be scared by nothing, he decided that he would be the one to do it. And so he waited until the king planned a feast, and disguised himself there as a roast so succulent and delicious that no man could resist eating it.

‘The king was intrigued by this new dish, and he ordered that it be served to him at once. This pleased the Devil, who waited until the knife was lowering before saying in a voice that boomed around the halls, “If you eat me, you will die!”

‘”That may be,’ said the king.

‘The Devil was angered by this. The king was not even shocked that a roast was talking to him! He said, “If you eat me, I will wear your skin like a cape!”

‘”That may be,’ said the king.

‘Now the Devil was quite upset. “If you eat me, I will feed my children with your guts!”

‘”That may be,’ said the king.

‘The Devil gnashed his teeth. “If you eat me, I will drink your blood from the cup of your skull!”

‘”That may be,’ said the king, and he cut the roast. It hurt the Devil no more than a pin prick would, but he was angrier than ever.

‘”If you eat me, I will crush your bones to a fine powder and give my wife a necklace of your eyes and teeth!’” he shouted.

‘”That may be,’ said the king. He lifted a bite of the roast to his mouth.

‘The Devil shrieked with outrage and reshaped himself to his natural form.

‘But the king was still not scared. “Go on,” he said to the Devil. “If you will do all the things you promise you will, then I will be scared of you.”

‘Now the Devil knew he was outwitted, for how could he scare a dead man? And so he gnashed his teeth harder than ever, and shook his fists, and became so angry that it burned him quite up to a cinder on the floor.

‘And that was the end of the Devil, and that is the end of my story. Go to sleep, my little dove.’

 

XV.

He sits and spins and watches as she works. His smile is an ugly thing, rotted and contorted.

There is no lust in it – ‘If you wanted a maiden, you will be quite disappointed,’ she had said to him, and he had recoiled with a sort of surprised anger – but his pleasure is all too obvious.

She says, in her sweetest tone, ‘I imagine it would be a wonderful thing to own a bird in a gilded cage.’

He does not dignify her with a response. The wheel spins and hums.

 

XVI.

The days have a doughy sameness to them, sliding and melding into each other. Days are nights and weeks and months and she wonders, wildly, clearly, if this life will drive her insane, if the unknown sun will rise and find her purpled and bloated on a rope, her feet circling over a chair. I have already died once, she says to herself. It did not hurt so much.

The knock at the door echoes in her ribs. Instinctively, she presses a fist to her stomach, her fingers balling so hard she imagines her palms will drip with blood. Visitor, begone, this is his place and it is mine, but it is not yours.

She sees, in shaky, still images, the flick of Rumplestilskin’s wrist to open the doors, Gaston’s sword flashing with its idiot’s brilliance, the blinding shine of the sun.  
You fool, you wonderful, brave, silly, stupid fool, here and gone, so quickly there’s not time to process it, and she wants to scream, feels it bubbling up in her throat, feels the world cracking underneath her feet, could spin out of control and into a thousand broken pieces so small they could never be put together again.

Rumplestiltskin picks up the rose and crushes its bloom in his fingers. He hovers on the balls of his feet, expectant.

She unclenches her fist and straightens, looks him in the eye. Her voice, when it comes out, sounds foreign to her ear. Steadily, she says, ‘It’s getting terribly cold outside. You should close the door.’

 

fin


End file.
